Horse Camp

Horse Camp is Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat’s latest collaborative work, where they recreate and explore a memory of building a fire with their father and youngest sister. The landscape where their family has been gathering and learning skills is the place where the Bear Hat’s education stems from and continues. Being out at camp in the bush offers opportunities to be open to the environment, learn traditions, and share stories.

Horse Camp, banner #1.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Horse Camp, 2017. Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton, AB.

Horse Camp, banner #2.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Horse Camp, 2017. Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton, AB.

Horse Camp, banner #3.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Horse Camp, 2017. Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton, AB.

Horse Camp, banner #4.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Horse Camp, 2017. Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton, AB.

Horse Camp, banner #5.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Horse Camp, 2017. Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton, AB.

Camp, 2017.

Camp, is a collaborative work from Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat that is a further exploration of their Cree heritage. Moving deeper and with more direction from their first collaboration project, Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets and Stories).

Native pride is a strange phrase and a hard one to understand. This culture is deep with history and ever adapting, Richelle and Brittney Bear Hat strive to bridge that gap of separation. Together they build conversation and storytelling as the main key to their practices. As sisters growing up in Calgary they have felt the loss and complexity of being Native which in turn has been significant in their own practices but also in becoming adults. They have learned that being Native is about more than one viewpoint and their experiences can help shape their culture.

Maps and Dreams is a group exhibition of work by contemporary artists that explores conceptions and implications of land use through cultural and industrial lenses. The exhibition specifically considers the territory of the Dane-zaa people of northeastern British Columbia, now in Treaty 8. Borrowing the title from Hugh Brody's book Maps and Dreams, a 1981 anthropological study of the Dane-zaa, the exhibition includes work by artists who consider how this land and its intersection with human use is articulated, represented and contested.

Curated by Brian Jungen and Melanie O'Brian.

Maps and Dreams.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Maps and Dreams, The Audain Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

Maps and Dreams.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Maps and Dreams. The Audain Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

Maps and Dreams.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Maps and Dreams. The Audain Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

Maps and Dreams.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Maps and Dreams. The Audain Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

Maps and Dreams.

Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat collaboration.

Maps and Dreams. The Audain Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

Kokum

Kokum is about Brittney Bear Hat's on-going exploration of relationships and the value they hold through storytelling, memory and traditions. With this body of work Bear Hat collects items that have been passed down to her from her Kokum (Grandmother in Cree). This specific relationship is unique to Bear Hat, she wasn’t able to connect with her Kokum until later in her adult life. Getting to know a part of herself that was so separate from her Blackfoot upbringing is what she wanted to focus on in this body of work. Bear Hat’s Kokum made her look deeper into the simplicity of receiving a gift and the significance that it can hold. Transforming these gifts into more, letting them become images on there own. Bear Hat wants to show the value of these gifts that are just ordinary household items and how they become so much more over time. They live in her home and are apart of Bear Hat’s daily life. Her Kokum was very hands on and showing her grandkids how to be in the outdoors. This is where Bear Hat’s stories start from, drawing from her own memories, she writes in black ink on the walls alongside with the family archive photos, and objects. Bear Hat is looking for that connection that brings all this elements together. Exploring these experiences and memories are what brings Bear Hat to understand what an image is and where it can go. Storytelling for Bear Hat is continually looking for the right time to tell the right story. It is an on-going practice for Bear Hat and Kokum pushes her to tell that story and gives her the right timing for these stories.

Kokum

Brittney Bear Hat solo show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Kokum

Brittney Bear Hat solo show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Kokum

Brittney Bear Hat solo show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Kokum

Brittney Bear Hat solo show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Kokum

Brittney Bear Hat solo show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Kokum

Brittney Bear Hat solo show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Kokum

Brittney Bear Hat solo show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Kokum

Brittney Bear Hat solo show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets and Stories)

For Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat, the term “Native Pride” is a strange phrase and a hard one to understand. As sisters growing up in Calgary, Alberta, they have felt the complexity of being Native, which has been significant for their own practices. The artists strive to know their culture, one that is deep with history and ever adapting. They have learned that being Native is about more than one viewpoint and that experience can be shared as storytellers through image and text, which in turn shapes their culture.

The artists wish to share the confidence instilled in them from family members, who have never doubted their ability to learn about the landscape they themselves so boldly navigate. Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets & Stories) presents gathered elements such as willow bark, charred wood, white flowers and mint leaves – letting them stand alone as quiet mementos, indicators of knowledge received.

Placing these specific materials on display is an act of honouring and showing their importance in our memory. With their mementos, text and a single image of home, the exhibition is focused on the stories we share and an openness to the stories that have yet to be shared. The Bear Hat sisters state, “There are always going to be lessons and experiences that separate us but in their own time, they will be passed on.”

Cream brings together six artists whose works explore a transition between two forms or ideas, bridging often-divergent conceptual spaces in order to develop a broader understanding of each. Past and present; memory and reality; physical and digital; boundaries found between disciplines, between artist and audience, or between artwork and gallery space. Whether the intention is to develop a deeper understanding of one’s history, surroundings, or society, each artist in Cream demonstrates that these forms are greater than the sum of their parts by employing elements of each to explore themes ranging from gender and identity to materiality, and using diverse mediums including installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture

Cream

Group show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Cream

Group show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Cream

Group show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Cream

Group show.

photo documentation courtesy of the gallery.

Home, 2015.

FUTURE STATION: 2015 ALBERTA BIENNIAL OF CONTEMPORARY ART

Art Gallery of AlbertaJanuary 24-May 3, 2015

Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art is an examination of the creative practices at work with Alberta artists and ultimately an expression on what it feels like to be an artist in Alberta. The title is derived from an abandoned transit platform located under the civic centre of the province’s capital, Edmonton. Future Station is in reality both a physical and allegorical place of transition and stasis: part urban mythology and part monument to the banality of dormant infrastructure. It serves as a metaphor for the status of contemporary visual culture in Alberta – it exists and functions as a potent vacancy awaiting due recognition.

Curated by Kristy Trinier and organized by the Art Gallery of Alberta

Home, 2015.

Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial

photo documentation courtesy of the artist.

Home, 2015.

Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial

photo documentation courtesy of the artist.

Home, 2015.

Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial

photo documentation courtesy of the artist.

Home, 2015

Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial

photo documentation courtesy of the artist.

Blackfoot, 2015.

Blackfoot, 2015. Billboard in SE Calgary, AB.

Atlas Sighed: The 2014–15 Calgary Biennial is a guerrilla exhibition of contemporary art. Comprising numerous infiltrations into public space, this endeavour appropriates commercial vernaculars of the urban landscape in order to challenge conservative status quos.

The Biennial will be dispersed throughout Calgary and its suburbs from December 1, 2014 through to March 31, 2015 with support from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Pattison Outdoor, and anonymous sponsors.

Curated by Steven Cottingham.

Blackfoot, 2015.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Ours, 2014.

Both residents of Alberta, Brittney Bear Hat and Jennifer Tellier explore what it means to call a colonized land home. Fostered by time under the stars, lectures around campfires and afternoons in a canoe the show OURS looks at the memories and moral lessons learned from the men that shape their lives, their dads.

That's What She Said

Both residents of Alberta, Brittney Bear Hat and Jennifer Tellier question what it means to call a colonized land home. Through weekly drawing performances the artists explore tensions associated with land, identity and belonging. The artists will deconstruct stereotypes currently informed by appropriation, romanticism and indifference, in an effort to begin a new dialogue. The two artists, similar in style, will merge in an installation of whose is who.